Not Personal, Not Impersonal

alcoholic South African

the continuing story of Nick and Maria. My housemate and his girlfriend.

Well Maria’s ex-flatmate, the alcoholic South African, is returning from rehab and wants Maria’s room. Maria’s landlord and his idiot-savant brother are both in love with this South African lady and so they want Maria to move out. Maria has duly consented, mainly because living there hasn’t been that great, and that she never signed a contract with them in the first place.

Maria therefore is going to be homeless soon, and so Maria has convinced Nick to move out the flat with me so that they can find a place together. All of this without getting married, something that Maria’s catholic parents might be upset by. I quizzed Maria on the subject and she said, “Well I completely stopped talking to my cousin after she moved in with a guy, I branded her a harlot and did my best to get her cut out of my grandfathers will and out of my families affections. But now I’m doing it, it doesn’t seem so bad. I guess I needed to grow up a little.” Maria’s father was in the country last week but left before this new situation presented itself. Apparently he asked Maria her opinion on the matter of living with Nick before getting married and she replied, “Oh no of course not, I couldn’t possibly do something like that. We’d need to get married first, I’d insist on it.” This was only last week, Maria is certainly growing up fast.

So I’m to be left without a housemate, but before that Nick and Maria need to find a place to live. There is a gap between Maria moving out and Nick and Maria moving into a new place. In the interim I shall have the joy that is a new housemate. I’m helping her move in tomorrow.

It has taken precisely 51 weeks since Nick and Maria met for them to move in together, but still there is the returning question of how they met. How indeed? Well by use of a cunning trick I managed to get Nick to tell me the answer once and for all. It’s been bugging me for a long time, and so I finally resorted to the most extreme way round of asking him that I could think of. I wrote a play.

Yes I admit it, I wrote a play just so that I could find out how they started going out. It revolves, perhaps unsurprisingly, around three characters who share a flat. They are called Alex, Nick and Maria. Alex is upset that he doesn’t know how they met but is too ashamed to ask them because they’ve been going out for so long that it seems ridiculous that he doesn’t already know.

There is a lot of other stuff going on as well but you get the idea. Anyway, Nick always reads all the stuff that I write to cast a critical eye over it, which is very handy really. So I simply diverted his act of kindness towards my machiavellian ways.

They met through internet dating, which I guess is hardly surprising. But he hasn’t told his parents yet so don’t pass it on.